You know, in the past, most people have waited until the other guys stopped killing them before claiming a victory.
Just as a side tangent, I'm not sure the mass media world we live in even allows for a decisive victory like we've seen in the past. Usually, you bomb/raid/destroy the hell out of a place to the point where they're just 'done' and you step in and say "heya, here's your new constitution. let's get to work rebuilding you.". Sure, you can say "it just makes them madder" and "that just creates more hate..." Yeah, it does to a point, until you cross this ruthless threshhold and something breaks in the human mind where they are "done". IE, what was done to germany. What was done to japan. Those countries were "broken".
And I don't care what you say about the iRaq war, and I in no way mean to diminish the horror of war, but that just isn't what was done there. For better or worse (i dont really have an opinion, just trying to form one) we are much more about trying to refactor countries instead of rewriting them, often for PR reasons and often for economic reasons.
Why would Glaser attempt negotiations via an email and a "leaked" version of the email?
These types of things are generally done for a few reasons:
1. One hell of a cheap press release. I mean, we're talking about it right? People aren't talking about real that much anymore, except in certain niche's (they do have good 'live' stream-creation tools). Analysts & others are going to comment on it, and to comment on it are going to have to investigate where/how it might sense or not, and hence, attention.
2. They may well want to put some outside pressure on Apple. Apple can tell the shareholders/board that they were approached, but that they dont think it is in Apple's interest, but if enough analysts latch onto the idea, and then influence shareholders enough... you never know. Or, I wouldn't be surprised if they've had talks with MS, and are just 'floating the deal' to see what comes up or
3. There's a reason why Apple never comments about linux on the desktop. Mindshare. They like people talking about Apple/Microsoft. They don't want a situation where people are talking Linux/Microsoft, and Apple isn't mentioned. Real is becoming somewhat marginalized outside of the streaming niche as a general player, and, theoretically, this has people associating them as being one of the three major players in the market, not just iTunes vs WMP, but rather iTunes vs WMP vs Real.
4. Ever seen what any sort of rumors about partnerships/acquisitions/anything can do to a stock price?
Yes, I *do* honestly think that. Consider the case of the web server: Apache has a couple more servers than IIS, yet my access logs show about 30 attempts a day to propogate IIS worms. Not Apache worms: IIS worms. This despite Apache's popularity.
I wonder, if MS had 60%+ share of the server market, but linux had 95% share of the home market, would you see lots and lots of hammering on that other 30% of the server market...
When in doubt, remember Stan Lee: with great power comes great responsibility. When you're talking about guns, security tools, money, r00t, broadband, or any form of power. The question seems to be, can you trust an individual to shoulder that responsibility, and if there are a few out there you can't trust, do you remove the power from everyone...
Wouldn't it be just as light, slim and quiet with os x?
The hardware would be, the software wouldn't. OSX is murder on hardware. I use it, I love it, but it is both very unoptimized and made (aqua) for a class of hardware that Apple is just now starting to get.
Something like the terminal can feel maddeningly slow in OSX, on that class of hardware. It doesn't feel like such in linux. Confused, because it's text? Run top in the terminal, and start resizing. Now launch X11, and do the same with the default xterm. Terminal is prettier, but the performance is night & day.*
Trivial things, like playing an MP3 in OSX will be sucking down 5-35% of your CPU depending in whether you're on a G5 or iBook, whereas you're talking ~1-5% with linux.
And, unfortunately, there are lots of *nix things that just might be where you want them for OSX, evolution is an example of something I love to run, but it an absolute bitch to get up on OSX. There are scores of valid reasons to choose to run Linux, on PPC. If OSX existed for x86, there'd still be valid reasons for running Linux/freebsd/etc, just as there are valid reasons for not having just one linux distro.
Repeat after me: someone making a different choice than you does not negate nor disparage your choice.
*Just before someone says it: QE only moves compositing to the GPU, windowmanager still makes drawing a bitch.
This was covered over at gizmodo awhile back, with more details and a link to a mini interview: gizmodo link.
My favorite part has been the "hints on future improvements" they dropped down:...Dawson dropped a hint of future developments with the scubadoo - "we're already working on the next model and think we can improve it in a host of ways. For example, currently you need to put your head under the water when you get into it. The next model will have a hinged hood so you don't need to get your head wet at all."
So... we have a fairly large, slow-moving (3mph?), and brightly painted foreign object traveling underwater. Can you say shark bait? Wouldn't it make some kinda sense for one of the first 'improvements' in this thing to be a mesh wrap-around cage for the back of the person?
Not as though you're gonna outrun the shark who happens to think you're a giant tasty angelfish, and if you even try you're just turning your exposed back to it... these things are gonna fade out the minute some tourist ends up in a kraken's belly.
Bush has many times the campaign money (due to business ties) that Kerry does, and has just finished a round of ads that have pushed him ahead in the polls again. If you thought Bush was bad in his first term, wait until his second, when he has no incentive to act with any kind of restraint, without the possibility of being re-elected.
It ain't that cut and dried. Please do a search on the smaller democratic 'subgroups' that have popped up to be able to suck the soft money into the democratic coffers as an end-run around campaign finance reform. Kerry theoretically isn't in control of it, but all the groups will be running pro-kerry-anti-bush ads. They have an astonishiing amount of money, just about matching Bush, and are the spur for him to be out sucking in more.
Direct elections of the president are hardly "mob rule". Any more than, say, direct elections for Senators are (which, you may recall was a hotly contested change some time back).
In other words, you simply read what I wrote instead of actually reading his writings.
"Mob rule" has to do with the fact that if, say, 50% of the people end up living in california, and 30% of the people live in NYC, the president can essentially promise the people of California and the people of NYC that he's going to ship all of their used toilet paper to the midwest.
The electoral college (and other aspects) are one of the checks and balances that help protect the country from only catering to one group of people.
While you're at it, be on the lookout for "by the cities, of the cities and for the cities"... direct elections were most assuredly considered, and while you may find the current terribly unfair and short sided as an undergrad, by the time you've graduated much will be clearer.:)
Sometime google jefferson's writings on the electoral college, and the dangers of direct elections... pretty sure you should be able to grep the text for "mob rule".
Kerry: Not Bush. Flip-flopped on issues a bit, decorated Vietnam vet, best hope for a not-Bush president. Campaign fund of around 2.4 mil.
Um, something to keep in mind when quoting figures is that is that well, democrats were pretty much the first in this case to completely emasculate campaign finance reform. Sure, the candidate isn't getting the large chunks of 'soft money', but rather something like 20+ pro-kerry groups are. Think move-on but much larger. And they collectively have something like 250million+ to spend. As they see fit. Prolly most in attack ads.
It's actually kinda funny, even as its sad (I've heard big-name dems basically say they're disgusted with how their party went straight out to try to work around the reforms) in that the repubs were far and away ahead in donations as far as what most people, but in reality are actually a little behind as they haven't gone and formed this 'independent' groups. They've started to make steps in that direction, but not really.
Although if I were Kerry I'd be real annoyed at just how much money got spent in the primaries by some of the wealthier candidates (Dean went through what, like $50mil+?) that just fattened up the media agencies that are gonna descend on him like a hawk once this boring race starts to really heat up.
We'd have Linux e-mail viruses in a minute if the popular e-mail clients added support for automatic execution of attachments. (Assuming anyone was foolish enough to use them.)
You might. But a lot of the viruses lately are oriented towards social-engineering (you have to save it, then enter a password, then you're screwed). There's nothing stopping someone from writing a linux virus that does that that I can think of, and it would be even easier on the mac.
Not kidding. Password-protect a.dmg with a malicious app, and it can trawl the in-plain-site addressbook or Mail's.mbox files for emails and other fun stuff, and hell, while the user would have to be stupid to type their password in again to give it access to the keychain it wouldn't stop it from sending out tons of mail through OSX's mail app, or simply through postfix...
mail -s "$spamsubject" $spamlist < $messagebodies
...will work out of the box on 10.3 if you don't want to touch Applescript). It would be absolutely trivial to do this in OSX even for someone of my limited skillz.
The problem is that it just wouldn't spread, it's pretty limited just by the size of the base. With a windows virus, when you shoot out a million viruses, you're shooting fish in a barrel when it comes to potential and then susceptible hosts to infect and then propogate the virus. It's not that way with a mac. It would limit its scrope very, very quickly and hence just not be that big of a deal.
Of course with how trained non-MS platforms are in feeling they don't have to ever worry about a virus, we'd prolly clicky-click the internet to its knees, even with our 3% share and 1-button mouse.
You really should all be living in fear of a mac virus, not a linux one.:)
Same problem- I haven't had airport connectivity since november. NOVEMBER. It's a real drag- luckily it works with hardware that isn't apples... IE, you can plug into a linksys or any other one and be fine, but not with apples snow. Sucks.
Look at Quartz Extreme on any AGP equippen G4 or G5 Mac. It is heavily 3D accelerated and looks 2D. The built in scaling and other acceleration tools that the 3D hardware brings to bare makes the OS extremeley snappy and responsive.
And it's not wastefull at all. It is simply taking advantage of commonly existing hardware that didn't exist when the original 2D API was created.
I'm not sure you realize just how wasteful it is, or just what QE is really doing. Launch top in two terminal windows, and start resizing one of them. Depending upon your machine, you can watch the window manager eating 10%-50%+ of your CPU, because at the moment, QE only accelerates compositing, not drawing. And a lot of it is could arguably be called "useless chrome", giving OSX the distinction of being the only OS I can think of to make going through my email not an immediate function. Hell, just launch xterm under X11 with top and start resizing- I try to avoid doing it because I freak out at how much faster it is for basic f'ing text.
It isn't to say that Quartz/etc isn't cool, but yeah, it eats up a lot of resources, even with QE. It's going to change, at least the speed (perhaps memory consumption too): longhorn will accellerate both drawing and compositing, and you can bet an upcoming version of OSX will too.
It's actually one of the reasons why I'm avoiding buying any new apple hardware right now: I'm guessing that within a year that'll be out in order to be able to beat longhorn to the punch, but with Apple's history, the cards in the boxen you buy now will prolly only be able to barely handle it.
People who say things like "Harry Potter/GTA/Something incited my kid to kill our hamster" are clutching at straws - that's not the issue, and they know it. If, however, Harry Potter featured a scene where he addressed the camera and told people how to eat hamsters, why it's good fun to do so, and asked us to follow in his footsteps, that would be incitement. That's what needs addressing. It's one thing to claim something incites, but unless it expressly does, it's a matter of opinion.
You're relying on people to apply good (and along your lines) judgement and common sense. Remember, there have been at least a few rape trials where the defendent said something along the lines of "she was wearing such a short skirt, she was asking for it". Or to be more realistic, someone in Texas deciding that a story about a gay couple living happily ever after would be promoting homosexuality or (until a bit ago) inciting someone to break the states sodomy laws.
damn, be-fan, looks like you have quite the knack for makiing the apple-zealot-read-some-buzzwords-off-of-pamphlet-t ypes get all defensive even though your posts go out of your way to take what they're going to say into account.
Ugh, this is horrible advice. The fastest computer of tomorrow won't help with the work you need done today. If you need a new machine now, buy it now, else you'll always be playing waiting game.
"If you can wait- wait" is not horrible advice. "Don't buy an apple portable now whatever you do" would be horrible advice.
So buy a fucking two button mouse and plug it in. *GASP* it works! Even better, you could buy a 5 or 12 or 40 button mouse, and as long as you could get drivers for all 40 buttons, it would work. Suprise suprise, apple actualy uses or at least is compatible with standard parts.
COOL! Can I plug in a new trackpad with more buttons on my powerbook?
I get turned off BSD (in spite of its more "secure" reputation) because I see any efforts amdcontributions I end up making to that system as a waste, since there's no one stopping M$ from apropriating my efforts. In fact, "Microsoft" services for linux is just that, as you saw in the/. story less than 24 hours ago.
I guess it depends on your mindset. If you are thing "us versus them", then yeah, you'll have a problem if competition is your goal. If you are thinking adoption, then you won't have a problem.
IE, lets assume you wanted standards-based HTML engines to be the du jour, to be adopted by everyone and anyone. Chances are you'd want to look at a BSD-based license, as it'll have a better chance of getting faster adoption. Hell, if MS would embed Moz instead of IE I'd be a happier camper.
I get what you're saying, I used to say the same thing... but the big thing for me is travel. IE, walking around the city all day. Walking around airports all day. Walking around campus all day. Walking around a conference all day......all of a sudden that extra weight really starts adding up on your shoulder. Big time. And smaller starts to look really enticing. First you start throwing anything you can out of your bag... magazines instead of books. You try to find small/light peripherals... and then you pick up a subnotebook and go "wow, this is a lot lighter than my current x" and boom, suddenly you're in the market.
Finder never crashes when browsing samba neworks under 10.3, and I've yet to have any problems with it
Riiiiiiiight. The only time my 10.3 finder isn't hanging in regards to SMB shares (you don't even want to get started with disconnecting shares, which is a LIL better with 10.3 but not much) are when it simply can't see them at all. Do some searching- SMB had real problems in 10.2, and they've honestly just gotten worse with 10.3. It's so rough I don't think Apple should be allowed to list the feature on the box.
That's an interesting scenario. How does an electoral college fix that? Look at the Nevada nuclear dump. The Feds are forcing Nevada to accept the waste from around the US. The Nevada resistance, fairly successful so far, gets no help from the Electoral College. Nevada state laws prohibit the dumping, as determined by the locals. Nevada congressmembers work to negotiate federal laws and policies that would dump in their state.
Um, what about your point doesn't illustrate the dangers of what I was saying? That's sorta one of the areas republicans/libertarians would point to as the federal government overstepping its bounds and imposing its will upon the states... overstepping its mandate, or simply saying that the federal government tries to exhibit too much influence over the states, to the point where there'll be few reasons to have state governments at all and they'll simply be an extension of the federal governments will (some would argue that this has already occurred in de facto due to states being tied to federal funding).
With a direct vote on all the issues, it'd simply be more acute. Your specific example is like saying "Look at what happened to this man by the police! It doesn't look like civil rights are protecting us at all, so why have them!"
As I noted in another post, the US republic, as per the classical model, works with voters choosing representatives to choose laws. Inserting the Electoral College, chosen by voters, choosing representatives, doesn't make us more of a republic. Deleting it doesn't make us a pure (direct, Athenian) "democracy", with voters choosing laws. If anything, the Electoral College builds a pair of republics, where voters choose a republic of electors, and those electors choose a republic of representatives. That's unwieldy, desirable only in comparison to a more unwieldy voter -> representative election. But the direct election of representatives is no longer as unwieldy
I'm not saying the electoral college is the perfect system- but was trying to illustrate the dangers of a pure democracy (popular vote!) as well, the democratics are really fond of bringing up in light of the Bush/Gore thing. The electoral college does protect against that in a way that a pure popular vote doesn't, even if it seems "less pure".
You do away with it- and that's whats going to happen, it's only natural. IE, if IL all worked via popular vote, it would be technically possible, and probably not "ungainly", but I can guarantee you that every single resource would automatically start going to Chicago, as that's where the majority of the voters are. Funding. Schooling. Trash/waste. You already see this sort of thing to a degree, as again, its only natural.
That's what having a republic is designed to protect against.
I subscribe to XM, and have a recurring problem. 200 channels and still nothing good to listen too. Satellite radio will never surpass a case of CDs and a CD player, and will always be a niche market.
Immediately drop the electoral college in favor of total popular vote percentage across the country, as it's an implementation artifact from centuries ago, when travel and communication was much cruder.
You really need to do some more background research. The electoral college, and the fact that we're a republic instead of a straight democracy isn't completely due to a lack of instant mass communication at the time of the founding.
Read Jefferson- they wanted to avoid a government "by the cities, of the cities and for the cities". In other words, you don't want your presidential candidate going to california and a few other highly populated states in the east coast and promising that you're going to ship all of their crap to the midwest.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, in the past, most people have waited until the other guys stopped killing them before claiming a victory.
Just as a side tangent, I'm not sure the mass media world we live in even allows for a decisive victory like we've seen in the past. Usually, you bomb/raid/destroy the hell out of a place to the point where they're just 'done' and you step in and say "heya, here's your new constitution. let's get to work rebuilding you.". Sure, you can say "it just makes them madder" and "that just creates more hate..." Yeah, it does to a point, until you cross this ruthless threshhold and something breaks in the human mind where they are "done". IE, what was done to germany. What was done to japan. Those countries were "broken".
And I don't care what you say about the iRaq war, and I in no way mean to diminish the horror of war, but that just isn't what was done there. For better or worse (i dont really have an opinion, just trying to form one) we are much more about trying to refactor countries instead of rewriting them, often for PR reasons and often for economic reasons.
Why would Glaser attempt negotiations via an email and a "leaked" version of the email?
These types of things are generally done for a few reasons:
1. One hell of a cheap press release. I mean, we're talking about it right? People aren't talking about real that much anymore, except in certain niche's (they do have good 'live' stream-creation tools). Analysts & others are going to comment on it, and to comment on it are going to have to investigate where/how it might sense or not, and hence, attention.
2. They may well want to put some outside pressure on Apple. Apple can tell the shareholders/board that they were approached, but that they dont think it is in Apple's interest, but if enough analysts latch onto the idea, and then influence shareholders enough... you never know. Or, I wouldn't be surprised if they've had talks with MS, and are just 'floating the deal' to see what comes up or
3. There's a reason why Apple never comments about linux on the desktop. Mindshare. They like people talking about Apple/Microsoft. They don't want a situation where people are talking Linux/Microsoft, and Apple isn't mentioned. Real is becoming somewhat marginalized outside of the streaming niche as a general player, and, theoretically, this has people associating them as being one of the three major players in the market, not just iTunes vs WMP, but rather iTunes vs WMP vs Real.
4. Ever seen what any sort of rumors about partnerships/acquisitions/anything can do to a stock price?
(call it Joggle?)
Gaggle.
Yes, I *do* honestly think that. Consider the case of the web server: Apache has a couple more servers than IIS, yet my access logs show about 30 attempts a day to propogate IIS worms. Not Apache worms: IIS worms. This despite Apache's popularity.
I wonder, if MS had 60%+ share of the server market, but linux had 95% share of the home market, would you see lots and lots of hammering on that other 30% of the server market...
When in doubt, remember Stan Lee: with great power comes great responsibility. When you're talking about guns, security tools, money, r00t, broadband, or any form of power. The question seems to be, can you trust an individual to shoulder that responsibility, and if there are a few out there you can't trust, do you remove the power from everyone...
Wouldn't it be just as light, slim and quiet with os x?
The hardware would be, the software wouldn't. OSX is murder on hardware. I use it, I love it, but it is both very unoptimized and made (aqua) for a class of hardware that Apple is just now starting to get.
Something like the terminal can feel maddeningly slow in OSX, on that class of hardware. It doesn't feel like such in linux. Confused, because it's text? Run top in the terminal, and start resizing. Now launch X11, and do the same with the default xterm. Terminal is prettier, but the performance is night & day.*
Trivial things, like playing an MP3 in OSX will be sucking down 5-35% of your CPU depending in whether you're on a G5 or iBook, whereas you're talking ~1-5% with linux.
And, unfortunately, there are lots of *nix things that just might be where you want them for OSX, evolution is an example of something I love to run, but it an absolute bitch to get up on OSX. There are scores of valid reasons to choose to run Linux, on PPC. If OSX existed for x86, there'd still be valid reasons for running Linux/freebsd/etc, just as there are valid reasons for not having just one linux distro.
Repeat after me: someone making a different choice than you does not negate nor disparage your choice.
*Just before someone says it: QE only moves compositing to the GPU, windowmanager still makes drawing a bitch.
This was covered over at gizmodo awhile back, with more details and a link to a mini interview: gizmodo link.
...Dawson dropped a hint of future developments with the scubadoo - "we're already working on the next model and think we can improve it in a host of ways. For example, currently you need to put your head under the water when you get into it. The next model will have a hinged hood so you don't need to get your head wet at all."
My favorite part has been the "hints on future improvements" they dropped down:
So... we have a fairly large, slow-moving (3mph?), and brightly painted foreign object traveling underwater. Can you say shark bait? Wouldn't it make some kinda sense for one of the first 'improvements' in this thing to be a mesh wrap-around cage for the back of the person?
Not as though you're gonna outrun the shark who happens to think you're a giant tasty angelfish, and if you even try you're just turning your exposed back to it... these things are gonna fade out the minute some tourist ends up in a kraken's belly.
Bush has many times the campaign money (due to business ties) that Kerry does, and has just finished a round of ads that have pushed him ahead in the polls again. If you thought Bush was bad in his first term, wait until his second, when he has no incentive to act with any kind of restraint, without the possibility of being re-elected.
It ain't that cut and dried. Please do a search on the smaller democratic 'subgroups' that have popped up to be able to suck the soft money into the democratic coffers as an end-run around campaign finance reform. Kerry theoretically isn't in control of it, but all the groups will be running pro-kerry-anti-bush ads. They have an astonishiing amount of money, just about matching Bush, and are the spur for him to be out sucking in more.
Direct elections of the president are hardly "mob rule". Any more than, say, direct elections for Senators are (which, you may recall was a hotly contested change some time back).
:)
In other words, you simply read what I wrote instead of actually reading his writings.
"Mob rule" has to do with the fact that if, say, 50% of the people end up living in california, and 30% of the people live in NYC, the president can essentially promise the people of California and the people of NYC that he's going to ship all of their used toilet paper to the midwest.
The electoral college (and other aspects) are one of the checks and balances that help protect the country from only catering to one group of people.
While you're at it, be on the lookout for "by the cities, of the cities and for the cities"... direct elections were most assuredly considered, and while you may find the current terribly unfair and short sided as an undergrad, by the time you've graduated much will be clearer.
Sometime google jefferson's writings on the electoral college, and the dangers of direct elections... pretty sure you should be able to grep the text for "mob rule".
Kerry: Not Bush. Flip-flopped on issues a bit, decorated Vietnam vet, best hope for a not-Bush president. Campaign fund of around 2.4 mil.
Um, something to keep in mind when quoting figures is that is that well, democrats were pretty much the first in this case to completely emasculate campaign finance reform. Sure, the candidate isn't getting the large chunks of 'soft money', but rather something like 20+ pro-kerry groups are. Think move-on but much larger. And they collectively have something like 250million+ to spend. As they see fit. Prolly most in attack ads.
It's actually kinda funny, even as its sad (I've heard big-name dems basically say they're disgusted with how their party went straight out to try to work around the reforms) in that the repubs were far and away ahead in donations as far as what most people, but in reality are actually a little behind as they haven't gone and formed this 'independent' groups. They've started to make steps in that direction, but not really.
Although if I were Kerry I'd be real annoyed at just how much money got spent in the primaries by some of the wealthier candidates (Dean went through what, like $50mil+?) that just fattened up the media agencies that are gonna descend on him like a hawk once this boring race starts to really heat up.
You might. But a lot of the viruses lately are oriented towards social-engineering (you have to save it, then enter a password, then you're screwed). There's nothing stopping someone from writing a linux virus that does that that I can think of, and it would be even easier on the mac.
Not kidding. Password-protect a
The problem is that it just wouldn't spread, it's pretty limited just by the size of the base. With a windows virus, when you shoot out a million viruses, you're shooting fish in a barrel when it comes to potential and then susceptible hosts to infect and then propogate the virus. It's not that way with a mac. It would limit its scrope very, very quickly and hence just not be that big of a deal.
Of course with how trained non-MS platforms are in feeling they don't have to ever worry about a virus, we'd prolly clicky-click the internet to its knees, even with our 3% share and 1-button mouse.
You really should all be living in fear of a mac virus, not a linux one.
Same problem- I haven't had airport connectivity since november. NOVEMBER. It's a real drag- luckily it works with hardware that isn't apples... IE, you can plug into a linksys or any other one and be fine, but not with apples snow. Sucks.
Look at Quartz Extreme on any AGP equippen G4 or G5 Mac. It is heavily 3D accelerated and looks 2D. The built in scaling and other acceleration tools that the 3D hardware brings to bare makes the OS extremeley snappy and responsive.
And it's not wastefull at all. It is simply taking advantage of commonly existing hardware that didn't exist when the original 2D API was created.
I'm not sure you realize just how wasteful it is, or just what QE is really doing. Launch top in two terminal windows, and start resizing one of them. Depending upon your machine, you can watch the window manager eating 10%-50%+ of your CPU, because at the moment, QE only accelerates compositing, not drawing. And a lot of it is could arguably be called "useless chrome", giving OSX the distinction of being the only OS I can think of to make going through my email not an immediate function. Hell, just launch xterm under X11 with top and start resizing- I try to avoid doing it because I freak out at how much faster it is for basic f'ing text.
It isn't to say that Quartz/etc isn't cool, but yeah, it eats up a lot of resources, even with QE. It's going to change, at least the speed (perhaps memory consumption too): longhorn will accellerate both drawing and compositing, and you can bet an upcoming version of OSX will too.
It's actually one of the reasons why I'm avoiding buying any new apple hardware right now: I'm guessing that within a year that'll be out in order to be able to beat longhorn to the punch, but with Apple's history, the cards in the boxen you buy now will prolly only be able to barely handle it.
People who say things like "Harry Potter/GTA/Something incited my kid to kill our hamster" are clutching at straws - that's not the issue, and they know it. If, however, Harry Potter featured a scene where he addressed the camera and told people how to eat hamsters, why it's good fun to do so, and asked us to follow in his footsteps, that would be incitement. That's what needs addressing. It's one thing to claim something incites, but unless it expressly does, it's a matter of opinion.
You're relying on people to apply good (and along your lines) judgement and common sense. Remember, there have been at least a few rape trials where the defendent said something along the lines of "she was wearing such a short skirt, she was asking for it". Or to be more realistic, someone in Texas deciding that a story about a gay couple living happily ever after would be promoting homosexuality or (until a bit ago) inciting someone to break the states sodomy laws.
You have to deal with the distasteful.
damn, be-fan, looks like you have quite the knack for makiing the apple-zealot-read-some-buzzwords-off-of-pamphlet-t ypes get all defensive even though your posts go out of your way to take what they're going to say into account.
Ugh, this is horrible advice. The fastest computer of tomorrow won't help with the work you need done today. If you need a new machine now, buy it now, else you'll always be playing waiting game.
"If you can wait- wait" is not horrible advice. "Don't buy an apple portable now whatever you do" would be horrible advice.
*shock* News flash! In about 6 months to a year, there will be faster computers. Who would have expected that?
As the owner of a 500MHz G4 machine that well, stayed the fastest CPU they had for a few years... with Apple, its not a given.
So buy a fucking two button mouse and plug it in. *GASP* it works! Even better, you could buy a 5 or 12 or 40 button mouse, and as long as you could get drivers for all 40 buttons, it would work. Suprise suprise, apple actualy uses or at least is compatible with standard parts.
COOL! Can I plug in a new trackpad with more buttons on my powerbook?
I get turned off BSD (in spite of its more "secure" reputation) because I see any efforts amdcontributions I end up making to that system as a waste, since there's no one stopping M$ from apropriating my efforts. In fact, "Microsoft" services for linux is just that, as you saw in the /. story less than 24 hours ago.
I guess it depends on your mindset. If you are thing "us versus them", then yeah, you'll have a problem if competition is your goal. If you are thinking adoption, then you won't have a problem.
IE, lets assume you wanted standards-based HTML engines to be the du jour, to be adopted by everyone and anyone. Chances are you'd want to look at a BSD-based license, as it'll have a better chance of getting faster adoption. Hell, if MS would embed Moz instead of IE I'd be a happier camper.
I get what you're saying, I used to say the same thing... but the big thing for me is travel. IE, walking around the city all day. Walking around airports all day. Walking around campus all day. Walking around a conference all day... ...all of a sudden that extra weight really starts adding up on your shoulder. Big time. And smaller starts to look really enticing. First you start throwing anything you can out of your bag... magazines instead of books. You try to find small/light peripherals... and then you pick up a subnotebook and go "wow, this is a lot lighter than my current x" and boom, suddenly you're in the market.
Finder never crashes when browsing samba neworks under 10.3, and I've yet to have any problems with it
Riiiiiiiight. The only time my 10.3 finder isn't hanging in regards to SMB shares (you don't even want to get started with disconnecting shares, which is a LIL better with 10.3 but not much) are when it simply can't see them at all. Do some searching- SMB had real problems in 10.2, and they've honestly just gotten worse with 10.3. It's so rough I don't think Apple should be allowed to list the feature on the box.
That's an interesting scenario. How does an electoral college fix that? Look at the Nevada nuclear dump. The Feds are forcing Nevada to accept the waste from around the US. The Nevada resistance, fairly successful so far, gets no help from the Electoral College. Nevada state laws prohibit the dumping, as determined by the locals. Nevada congressmembers work to negotiate federal laws and policies that would dump in their state.
Um, what about your point doesn't illustrate the dangers of what I was saying? That's sorta one of the areas republicans/libertarians would point to as the federal government overstepping its bounds and imposing its will upon the states... overstepping its mandate, or simply saying that the federal government tries to exhibit too much influence over the states, to the point where there'll be few reasons to have state governments at all and they'll simply be an extension of the federal governments will (some would argue that this has already occurred in de facto due to states being tied to federal funding).
With a direct vote on all the issues, it'd simply be more acute. Your specific example is like saying "Look at what happened to this man by the police! It doesn't look like civil rights are protecting us at all, so why have them!"
As I noted in another post, the US republic, as per the classical model, works with voters choosing representatives to choose laws. Inserting the Electoral College, chosen by voters, choosing representatives, doesn't make us more of a republic. Deleting it doesn't make us a pure (direct, Athenian) "democracy", with voters choosing laws. If anything, the Electoral College builds a pair of republics, where voters choose a republic of electors, and those electors choose a republic of representatives. That's unwieldy, desirable only in comparison to a more unwieldy voter -> representative election. But the direct election of representatives is no longer as unwieldy
I'm not saying the electoral college is the perfect system- but was trying to illustrate the dangers of a pure democracy (popular vote!) as well, the democratics are really fond of bringing up in light of the Bush/Gore thing. The electoral college does protect against that in a way that a pure popular vote doesn't, even if it seems "less pure".
You do away with it- and that's whats going to happen, it's only natural. IE, if IL all worked via popular vote, it would be technically possible, and probably not "ungainly", but I can guarantee you that every single resource would automatically start going to Chicago, as that's where the majority of the voters are. Funding. Schooling. Trash/waste. You already see this sort of thing to a degree, as again, its only natural.
That's what having a republic is designed to protect against.
I subscribe to XM, and have a recurring problem. 200 channels and still nothing good to listen too. Satellite radio will never surpass a case of CDs and a CD player, and will always be a niche market.
Like cable television?
Immediately drop the electoral college in favor of total popular vote percentage across the country, as it's an implementation artifact from centuries ago, when travel and communication was much cruder.
You really need to do some more background research. The electoral college, and the fact that we're a republic instead of a straight democracy isn't completely due to a lack of instant mass communication at the time of the founding.
Read Jefferson- they wanted to avoid a government "by the cities, of the cities and for the cities". In other words, you don't want your presidential candidate going to california and a few other highly populated states in the east coast and promising that you're going to ship all of their crap to the midwest.